Rants and raves about the mess of higher education in the United States.

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

An Adjunct Dies Honorably

By Professor Doom

I’ve written a
few times of the incredibly exploitative system that is the fate of most
faculty in higher education today: adjuncthood. Instead of teaching and
research in a professional job, the reward for many of our highly educated
members of society is subsistence living on the fringe, earning less than
minimum wage working for ridiculously highly paid administration.

Part of the
reason for this abuse is simple supply and demand: there are lots of people
with advanced degrees and no jobs, desperate for anything, especially something
that relates to all the time they spent studying. Granted, some of this
oversupply is due to the all the bogus institutions granting bogus degrees, in
turn due to bogus accreditation, but the fact remains, there are still quite a
few legitimately educated people being exploited most abusively.

One of them, at
least, has decided to do the right thing, and reduce the supply:

Ok, that’s a
scary title, and he’s not dead…but he has admitted that being an adjunct is
simply supporting a system of exploitation.

“I have worked 6 day
weeks. And in the spring of 2013, ran a 7 day a week schedule after I added to
my 8 university classes 4 self-run online, interactive classes held through
video conferencing…”

Like many
adjuncts, he has to work a ridiculous schedule simply to get by. High school
teachers teach 5 courses a semester…he’s teaching 8. Typical full time faculty
teach perhaps 4 a semester (it varies, but I’ve never seen more than 5).

Likemany adjuncts, he’s done the math and
realizes something is very wrong:

“For all these
efforts, I have been paid between merely $2,500-$4,200 per section of
philosophy, with no health insurance or retirement benefits or any other such
alternate forms of compensation (while each class I taught generated
$35,000-$105,000 in revenue to the universities)…”

Much like I’ve
noticed, this former adjunct doesn’t understand why, if he’s bringing in
$500,000 or more of revenue a semester, there’s only enough money in higher
education to pay him some $15,000 a semester…with no benefits or job security
in any form.

He’s a VERY
LUCKY adjunct to make that much, by the way. The bottom line is still, there’s
no excuse for the wide disparity in pay between the teachers in higher
education, and the administrators (where an administrator making less than 100k
a year is somewhat unusual). Tack on the insane hours and abuse that adjuncts
must take, and it simply makes no sense to teach college as a career.

He also says that he
was enabling what he calls higher education’s exploitative labor system, and
that it affected him deeply. "I also realize that by continuing to allow
universities to take advantage of my labor at a discounted rate, I was helping
to perpetuate a pernicious system that was harming my peers and me,” he wrote.

Pernicious is one
of those $10 words us academic types use. In this case it means deadly, causing
great harm. And he’s right. The course load he needs as an adjunct is
destructive to education, and is destructive to fellow teachers. It’s also
deadly for him: he can’t sustain those kinds of hours, and with no benefits,
there’s simply no future in it for him. All he has to do is get sick for a
week, and his career is over, permanently.

For a career,
that’s as deadly as it gets.

For his new career,
he’s just going to start teaching classes on his own. Amazingly enough, it’s
working to some extent:

So far, Fincke has
offered standalone courses. But he’ll soon start offering sessions that meet repeatedly over a series of weeks
and months, on variations of the same topic, including Nietzsche, ethics, and
introductory philosophy. Class sessions average about $16 per hour, per
student. Most classes have few students and involve lots of dialogue with
Fincke. MOOCs and other static content “can’t touch that,” he said.

Do note: he’s
offering a real education. Instead of hordes of students massed in an auditorium,
diligently copying down some lame PowerPoint presentation, his students have
“lots of dialogue” with Fincke…this is an aspect of education that is
completely gone from what we laughably call higher education today, with
dialogue and instruction replaced in most cases by mindless scantron tests and
journals where students talk about their feelings. He’s happier, the students
are better off, and he has a real future.

There can be no
greater sign of the failure of higher education today that both student and
teacher are better off when the schools are removed.

I certainly wish
him well, and am glad to hear of his success so far. The comments section is
generally supportive, but a few are worth note:

if the colleges that
hired him knew full well of the extent of his other classes, then they should
be brought up on ethics charges. eight and eleven courses at a time spread out
among different colleges is not reasonable person, student, or college.

Ethics charges?
Administration? HAhahahaha. While regular readers of my blog know of the
chronic malfeasance of administrators and abuse of faculty, realize most people
in “the real world” are really at this level of ignorance as who what higher
education today is all about. The commenter is answered easily enough:

Huh? In my years as an
adjunct, administrators have been scrupulously incurious about my non-teaching
time, probably because they'd rather not know how I make a living on their
sub-subsistence wages. Administrators know full well that they are on the wrong
side of any ethical equation when it comes to adjunct labor. Additionally,
Fincke's case is more typical than outlier;

One more
comment from a veteran faculty, just to illustrate how little of what I’ve had
to say on this blog is either new or particularly imaginative. I’ll cut it into
pieces, however:

“Somehow Accrediting
Agencies need to step up and require that no more than 25% of courses offered
can be taught by adjuncts and also class sizes on the average need to be no
more than 40 students on the average…”

Seriously, almost everyone in higher
education knows that accrediting agencies have failed, deeply, in their
mission. Much of the fraud of higher education could be casually fixed by
fixing accreditation.

“The guidelines of SACS, an accrediting agency
for southern universities, call for assessment of a student being able to
engage in critical thinking. The use of multiple-choice tests, the mainstay of
assessment in large classes, cannot measure a student's ability to communicate in
written form their critical thinking. Moreover, if 200 students turn in
research papers, which require even10 minutes each to analyze and write
comments on (probably an underestimate), then that is at least a 30 hour
project for a professor (or probably a graduate student at most research
institutions).”

And, again, any professor that looks
at what’s going on in higher education realizes that the current system is
deeply unlikely to provide any education. It’s simply not possible to assign
papers in classes of size 200. It’s simply not possible to give a real test of
ability with a Scantron. And yet that is the typical class in higher education
today, and SACs (or any every other accreditor) legitimizes this obvious fraud.
Every time.

But, at least there’s
one less adjunct being exploited by this system.